Afterwards

by Rosamund Lupton

  “As you’re under eighteen,” Mohsin says, “you should have an adult with you to—”

  “Can Jenny’s aunt stay with me?”

  “Yes, if that’s what you’d like.”

  Mohsin looks at Sarah, and some kind of communication passes between them.

  Sarah sits in the chair next to Rowena’s bed.

  “Last time we spoke,” she says, “you said that Silas Hyman was very good-looking?”

  Rowena turns away from Sarah, embarrassed.

  “You said you used to watch him …?”

  Rowena looks so acutely self-conscious that I feel uncomfortable too.

  “Did you find him attractive?” Sarah asks, kindly.

  Rowena is silent. “Rowena?”

  “I had a crush on him from the moment I saw him.”

  She turns away so that she can’t see Mohsin, as if she doesn’t like him being there, and he steps farther back towards the door.

  “I knew he’d never look at someone like me,” she continues to Sarah. “Men like him never do. You know, the handsome ones.”

  She stops talking. Sarah doesn’t butt into the silence, waiting for Rowena. “If I could swap being clever for pretty,” Rowena says quietly, “I’d do it.”

  “You also told me you thought he could be violent.”

  It’s as if Sarah has slapped her.

  “I shouldn’t have said that,” she says. “It wasn’t right to say that.”

  “Maybe it was honest?”

  “No. It was stupid. I really don’t see him that way at all. I mean, I just guessed that he could be. But we all could be, couldn’t we? I mean, anyone has the capacity for it, don’t they?”

  “Why did you have a crush on him if you thought he might be violent?”

  Rowena doesn’t reply.

  “Was he ever violent to you?” Mohsin asks.

  “No! He never touched me. I mean, not in that way. Not in a bad way.”

  “But he did touch you,” Sarah says.

  Rowena nods.

  “Were you having a relationship with Silas?” Mohsin asks.

  Rowena looks at Sarah, seemingly torn.

  “I’m a police officer asking you a question,” Mohsin continues. “And you have to tell me the truth. Doesn’t matter what promises you’ve made.”

  “Yes,” Rowena says.

  “But you said he didn’t look at you?” Sarah asks gently.

  “He didn’t. I mean, not to start with. It was Jenny he wanted. He was besotted with her, flirted with her all the time. She didn’t flirt back, got a little irritated I think. But I was always there. And finally he noticed me.”

  “How did that make you feel?” Sarah asks.

  “Unbelievably lucky.”

  For a moment she looks happy and proud.

  “Going back, Rowena,” Sarah says. “You said he’d never touched you in a bad way?”

  She nods.

  “Has he ever hurt you? Maybe accidentally? Or …?”

  Rowena turns away.

  “Rowena?”

  She doesn’t reply.

  “You said to me that someone can have the angel and the devil inside them?” Sarah says, coaxing. “And that your job is to get rid of the devil?”

  Rowena turns to face her.

  “It sounds medieval, I know. You could put it a different way, go twenty-first century and talk about multiple personalities, but the cure’s the same, I think. Just love. Loving someone can cast out the devil or make a person mentally well again. If you love them enough.”

  “Has Silas been to visit you here?” Mohsin asks.

  “No. It’s over between us. A while ago, actually. But even if we were still together, well, he wouldn’t want Mum to see him with me.”

  “Your mum doesn’t like him?” Sarah asks.

  “No. She wanted me to break it off.”

  “And did you?”

  “Yes. I mean, I didn’t want to upset Mum so much. I don’t think he understood, though.”

  “Was it your parents who told the Richmond Post about Silas, after the playground accident?” Mohsin asks.

  “It was just Mum. Daddy said it wasn’t fair to try and get someone the sack. Not for personal reasons. Said it wasn’t right. But Mummy hates Silas. So she phoned the paper.”

  Good for Maisie. Vestiges of the friend I used to know remain intact when it counts. She might not have left Donald, but she stood up for her daughter with Silas.

  I’m not sure if she knew that her phone call would lead to the bankruptcy of her family. But I think even if she did, she would still have gone ahead.

  “How old were you last summer, when it started?” Sarah asks.

  “Sixteen. But my birthday’s in August, so I was almost seventeen.”

  “You must have missed him, after you had to break it off?”

  Rowena nods.

  “Did he try and get in touch with you again?”

  She nods, tears spilling now.

  “Did he ever ask you to do something for him? Something that you knew was wrong?”

  “No, of course not. I mean, Silas wouldn’t do something like that to me. He’s always been kind to me.”

  She’s a terrible liar.

  A nurse comes in. “I need to change her dressings and give her her antibiotics.”

  Mohsin stands up. “We’ll see you a little later, Rowena, OK?”

  Mohsin and Sarah leave.

  “So it’s textbook—abused child goes for abusive partner?” Mohsin asks.

  “Could stick it up on PowerPoint at the next domestic violence seminar,” Sarah replies. “Some experts think it’s because the abused girl hopes that she can make the abusive partner love her and be kind to her. And that will somehow make amends for her father. She’ll be making her father love her by proxy.”

  “Sounds like bullshit to me,” Mohsin says. “I’ll call the station and get someone down here with the recording equipment. We’ll do it all by Baker’s bloody book.”

  Sarah nods.

  “Do you think Silas Hyman asked her to start the fire?” Mohsin asks.

  “I don’t know. It’s possible, but I think it’s more likely that she enabled him to do it. She’s clearly vulnerable to him, and I think he’d exploit that. But the same is true of her father. I think both Silas Hyman and Donald White would exploit Rowena for their own ends.”

  Penny is hurrying down the corridor towards them.

  “Donald White has been released without charge,” she says. She sees Sarah’s expression. “He has an alibi and a good lawyer. There was nothing we could do to legitimately keep him any longer.”

  “Do you know where he’s gone?” Sarah asks.

  “No.”

  “And Silas Hyman?”

  “We’re looking at the building sites. Nothing yet.”

  So both Donald White and Silas Hyman could be here in the hospital.

  I follow Sarah along a glassed-in walkway towards the ICU. As I look down to the parched, too-hot garden beneath, I can see Jenny’s blond head and, beside her, Ivo. From above I watch him move closer towards her. She bends her body towards his.

  32

  You are in the corridor of the ICU with Sarah, keeping watch on Jenny through the glass.

  “But there must be some way they can find him?” you say, incredulous; furious.

  “We don’t even know if he’s actually working on a building site, or if that’s a line he spun his wife. We’ll keep looking for him. And Donald White.”

  “I only spoke to Donald at school things. And it was years ago. But I don’t think he’s the type of bloke to do this.”

  “There isn’t really a type,” Sarah says. “Have you spoken to Ads?”

  Emotion tenses your face. You shake your head. “I’ll go and see him as soon as you’ve found them both.”

  Sarah nods. “Maybe when the arsonist is locked up, it’ll be different for Addie,” she says.

  Will he speak then? Surely he will.

 
Ivo walks past you and into Jenny’s ward. But only I see that Jenny is with him. They go up to her bed.

  This is the first time she has seen herself since right after the fire. Her face looks worse than it did then, more swollen and blistered. Even though she knows she won’t be scarred, I dread what she must feel as she sees her burnt face, her plastic-encased body.

  I make myself look at her.

  Her tears are falling onto Ivo’s face, and he wipes them away as his own.

  I think she was afraid of his rejection before and she was protecting herself. And now she doesn’t have to. It’s his love that gives her the strength to look at herself.

  Sarah comes up to Ivo, moved by his distress.

  “She’s not going to scar,” she says to him.

  “Yes, her dad said.”

  But I know it’s not her appearance that distresses him. It’s what she must have suffered.

  You tell Sarah and Ivo that you need to see me for a little while. Sarah wants to catch up with the police, but there’s now Ivo as a member of the guard rota at her bedside. And I trust him, as you do.

  Jenny and Ivo stay at her bedside together.

  I join her.

  “Dad’s got Ivo guarding me now?”

  “Yes.”

  For the first time she doesn’t argue that there’s no need for a guard, doesn’t say it’s ridiculous. Maybe now Ivo’s here she can face this fear, as she’s facing her body. I leave her with Ivo and go after you.

  You reach my bed and hold my hand. My fingers look pale after being out of the sun for nearly four days; my ring mark is disappearing. But your fingers, with the dark hairs and square-cut nails, still look strongly capable.

  “Ivo’s with Jenny, darling,” you say to me. “I think that’s what she wants.”

  “Yes.”

  Because I was right about Jenny after all—she does love him. But I was right too when I said I don’t know her, not all of her. Just as I can’t physically pick her up anymore, she is no longer entirely knowable by me.

  “You think she’s too young for something to be so serious,” you say. “But …”

  “She’s nearly grown up now,” I finish off. “And I ought to see that.”

  She’s become an adult; a young adult, yes, but still an adult with spaces that are hers alone.

  “I know she’ll always be little Jen too, to us,” you say.

  “Yes.”

  “But we have to kind of disguise that. For her sake.”

  You understand.

  “I don’t think any parent really ever lets go,” I say to you.

  “Some parents are just better at pretending,” you say.

  As we talk, with only me hearing both of us, but you intuiting my words, I remember, again, that we have spoken every day since we first met. Nineteen years of talking to each other.

  When you were away filming, we spoke long distance, the words between us hissing and fading in and out, but I still painted a picture of my day, and you—well, I was going to say you framed it, neat and pat, but it’s not that. Because we might not have young love, or find each other beautiful in that eyebeams-threading way anymore, but you give me the canvas to paint on tomorrow.

  And it’s only now, right now, that I properly appreciate you sitting with me and still talking to me. Every chance you get, whenever Sarah and now Ivo can guard Jenny, you come to me.

  Do you remember Sarah’s reading at our wedding?

  At the time I didn’t take much notice. We were only in the church to please my father (“It’ll mean so much to him” and I’d wanted to make up for being a pregnant bride), and we’d gone for the usual off-the-shelf ready-made-for-weddings reading from Corinthians.

  “Love is patient and kind,” Sarah read out, standing in the pulpit. But I felt far from patient or kind as she read, so bloody slowly! My shoes were much too high—Mum had been right about that—and my toes were pinched. How come the guests were allowed to sit down but we weren’t?

  “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

  Apart from killer heels on a hard church floor.

  But I do remember the ending of her reading. “… now faith, hope and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”

  And I think that you loving me still takes faith.

  And your faith that I can hear you now takes love.

  Again a watched-pot hope as we return to Jenny’s bedside together.

  She isn’t here.

  A nurse sees your alarm and tells you she’s just been taken to the MRI suite, and her boyfriend and a doctor from the ICU have gone with her.

  You hurry out.

  The ICU is secure with its locked door and high ratio of medical staff, but out here danger prowls the corridors and jostles into the crowded lifts and maybe a murderer is striding towards our vulnerable daughter.

  I try and still my fear. Ivo is with her. And there’s a doctor with her too. They won’t let anything happen to her. Besides, surely both Donald and Silas are too intelligent to risk another attack.

  I slow my pace to a walk while you race on.

  I pass the chapel door and hear a low, animal keening sound. I go in.

  She’s kneeling at the front of the church. Her crying is the sound of despair, a scream fragmenting into tears.

  Every nerve in me jangles into a run to her. I put my arms around her.

  “I didn’t want to be with him, Mum.”

  “But he loves you. I saw that. He’s only left you now so that he could go to the MRI suite, because Dad was with me. He hasn’t rejected you, if that’s what you—”

  “I know he loves me. I’ve always known that.”

  She turns to me, and I can hardly bear to look at the anguish on her face. As bad as looking at her burnt face. Blistering with pain in front of me.

  “I knew that if I saw him, I’d want to live too much.”

  “Jenny-wren—”

  “I don’t want to die!” she shouts; and her shout echoes around the chapel until it’s a sonic boom of emotion that breaks bones.

  “Jen, listen—”

  Her face is starting to shimmer. She’s getting too bright to look at. When this happened before, her heart had stopped.

  This can’t happen. Not now. Please.

  This can’t happen.

  And I’m running to the MRI suite, down corridors, through swing doors, passing too many people, their faces so harsh in the barred overhead lights.

  She needs a heart. Right now. Right this moment. The surgeons need to be taking her old damaged one out and putting in one that will keep her alive.

  I race to the lifts and get in as the doors close.

  But Miss Logan had told you, rammed it home, that she had to be stable first. Not dying. Not this.

  I think of that awful sound in the chapel.

  She’s been so frightened as she faced death. Terrified. But all along standing tall and sheltering me with her humor.

  Sheltering me.

  I’d discovered she’d grown up, but I hadn’t seen her courage.

  The lift is going too slowly. Too bloody slowly.

  I think about the red paint. “She said her parents would be so upset, she didn’t want to worry them …” But I hadn’t paused to hear her words.

  How long has she been protecting us? And I called her immature.

  I remember Sarah hadn’t looked surprised.

  The lift stops, stops! People politely waiting to get in. I run to the stairs.

  I think of the gravel cutting into her feet and the sun scorching her as she made herself remember back to the fire, to help Adam. Because she loves him and is courageous in her love for him.

  I reach the ground floor and hurry to the MRI suite.

  I think of the times that I’ve been tactless and insensitive and patronizing and she’s just teased me; her generosity of spirit.

  Nearly there. Nearly there.

  Why haven’t I seen th
is before? Seen Jenny? The extraordinary person that she has grown into.

  No longer a child—an astonishing adult.

  “But your daughter, yes. Always.”

  There’s a cubicle, and medical staff are hurrying towards it.

  I go in.

  Doctors surround her and their machinery makes inhuman noises and you are there and I think of the river Styx and Jenny being rowed towards the underworld. But the doctors are trying to reach her, throwing ropes with grappling hooks over the side of the boat, and they’re pulling it, pulling her, back to the land of the living.

  You are staring at the monitor.

  It has a trace.

  It has a trace!

  I feel euphoric.

  “Her physical condition has drastically deteriorated,” Miss Logan tells you and Sarah at Jenny’s bedside. “We can keep her stable for two, maybe three, days.”

  “And then …?” you ask.

  “We’ve run out of options. I have to tell you that the chance of finding a donor heart in the time frame left to her is nonexistent.”

  I feel your exhaustion. The boulder of love you’ve been carrying up that mountain has slipped all the way down to the bottom. And you have to start that Herculean task all over again.

  “You’ve got it wrong, Mum!” Addie told me. “The boulder wasn’t Hercules. Hercules had to kill loads of monsters, the really bad ones, you know, like Cerberus? Although he did have to clean out a cowshed too.”

  “That sounds easier.”

  “No, cos the cattle were special god-cattle and they made huge amounts of poo and he had to divert a river. It was Sisyphus who had to push the boulder.”

  “Poor Sisyphus.”

  “I’d rather push a boulder than fight a monster.”

  Mohsin arrives in the ward.

  “I’m sorry, but I thought you ought to know straightaway. It was deliberate. Just now, while she was in the MRI suite, someone disconnected her respirator.”

  In the parched garden, I sit with Jenny.

  “They’ll give you proper protection now,” I say. “Apparently Baker’s sending half of Chiswick police station down here. And Penny’s already started taking statements.”

  “Bolting the stable door and all that …”

  “Yes.”

  Then we talk, properly; privately.

  It wouldn’t be right to tell you our conversation; that’s up to Jenny—one day, if she can remember. But I can tell you I apologize to her. And that I’m now going to tell her my shoe analogy because I think she’ll like it.